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Comment: Liam Fay: Newgrange casts spell on the press

At sunrise on the year’s shortest day, as every Irish schoolchild knows, a shaft of sunlight illuminates the central chamber of the megalithic passage tomb at Newgrange in Co Meath.

Less widely acknowledged is the equally spectacular effect that the sight of this simple sunbeam can have on the more wide-eyed of the reporters who convene to cover the event. In recent years, the annual Newgrange light show has turned their prose a funny shade of purple.

The 2004 award for the most florid dispatch from the golden dawn goes to Eileen Battersby, the Irish Times’ literary editor who on Wednesday waxed long and lyrical about her Boyneside encounter with the winter solstice.

“Yesterday was perfection,” wrote Battersby. “In the flood of warm honey light, mere words became redundant. Tom Parlon, the minister of state at the Office of Public Works, exited the passageway as if he had seen a